Vocal chop maker

What a vocal chop is

A vocal chop is a short piece of a voice, a syllable or a breath, played back from a pad or a key as a rhythm or a new melody. Producers cut them from acapellas and from their own voice. Here the voice is yours: two bars sung into the phone, cut where one syllable ends and the next begins.

Where it cuts, and where it gets it wrong

The slicer is the one Brumm's app uses for your voice. It reads the notes you sang and how loud the take is over time: notes that follow each other with no gap and no dip of 5 dB stay one syllable, a new one starts 80 ms before its vowel so the consonant comes along, and the last one keeps 120 ms of tail.

That fails in known places. A breath before a word can become a chop of its own; a legato line ("oh-oh-oh" on one breath) stays one long chop; an s or a t without a note in it can be cut off. So every edge moves: drag it on the waveform or use the Start and End sliders, Split cuts a chop at its quietest moment, Join puts two back together.

Trim, fade, reverse, tune

Each chop has a fade in and a fade out (a few milliseconds are always there, so nothing clicks), Reverse plays it backwards, the reversed vocal of a riser. Tune moves it in semitones the way a sampler does: higher is shorter and brighter, lower is longer and darker. In tune pulls the sung pitch to the nearest semitone and shows how far off it was, in cents.

Every chop sits on a key: the first on MIDI note 36, the General MIDI kick and where pad grids often start, the rest one semitone up each. Keys from 60 moves them to middle C, for a sampler played from a keyboard. On a laptop the letters A W S E D F T G Y H U J K O L P play them, the way a DAW's computer keyboard does.

What you download

One ZIP: every chop as its own WAV (mono, 24-bit, at your phone's sample rate, usually 48 kHz), named by its pad and its MIDI note; the phrase as chopped as one more WAV; and a MIDI file at 123 BPM that plays the phrase on the mapped keys. Drop the WAVs on the pads of a drum rack or a sampler with the same notes, play the MIDI file, and the phrase comes back.

Apps disagree on the octave names: note 36 is C1 in Ableton Live and C3 in FL Studio. So the pads show the number, which is the same in every app.

Or play them in a track

Use them in a track opens Brumm with your phrase as chopped: it lands as your voice, in time, inside a club track with a beat and a bass, and the app moves each syllable to the track's key. The recording goes from this page to the app on your phone, not over the internet.

Your voice stays on your phone: the chops are cut and saved in the browser, and the app gets them only when you open it. How the site counts visits.